New resources added to soy deforestation checker
Three new user resources have been added to the SojaCheck website, BVRio’s free soy production map and tool for assessing deforestation and conversion of native vegetation at the farm level for production areas in the Brazilian Cerrado region.
The new resources are aimed primarily at sustainability managers working in businesses which have soy from Brazil in their supply chains, and are an overview of the Brazilian soy industry, an essential guide to the Brazilian Forest Code and a user guide to the IBAMA (Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis) database which is used to assess the legal compliance of soy farmers and check if the farm is subject to any deforestation embargoes.
Since its launch last year, the tool has seen over 46,000 searches. A short survey of users on the site showed a good spread of users through the soy supply chain.
“We are really pleased how widely the tool is being used, showing how important barrier-free access to this information is. These new resources have been developed using feedback from stakeholders in the supply chain and we hope that they will make due diligence checks even easier and more accessible.” BVRio Director, Grace Blackham.
The tool covers over 92,000 farms, an area of over 61 million ha, and with only a farm CAR Number, users can quickly and easily see if there are any deforestation indicators associated with farms in their supply chain. Farms themselves can also access the free tool in order to create and download a report to provide to their buyers. An estimated 52.4 million tonnes of soy is produced annually in the Cerrado, 43% of Brazil’s total production.
Legislation under development in the EU will require that commodities such as soy are not placed or made available on the EU market, or exported from the EU, unless they are deforestation-free after a cut-off date of 31st December 2020 and have been produced in accordance with the relevant legislation of the country of production. While the regulation initially only includes forests, thereby excluding much of the Cerrado, it is widely expected that ‘other forested land’ will be included in the final text, and that this will bring the Cerrado under the regulation. Commodities will need to be traced from the farm they are produced on using polygons with sufficient latitude and longitude points to describe the perimeter of the area.
The free to use tool is now available via https://soja.bvrio.org/ and does not require a log-in or registration to use.
